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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 28, 2008
Man of the year
For my last Sunday column of anno MMVIII, I will announce my selection for "Man of the Year." It was, as most, a year of thin choices in the public and political realm. Once again, Al Gore did not make my list of finalists.I didn't like any of the newly-elected presidents, either: not Asif Ali Zardari, "Mr. Ten Percent" of Pakistan; nor Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian place-holder; nor Ma Ying-jeou, the smooth compromiser of independent Taiwan; nor Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana (if he has indeed won); nor even Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe (who won the election, but did not become president); or Barack Obama of the United States (who won but is not yet installed). I have invested no hope in any of them, and thus must hope to be surprised. Among Time magazine's rival list of candidates, I was immediately able to eliminate Steve Jobs, Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Rem Koolhaas, "Brad and Angelina," Oprah Winfrey, and even Laura Bush's library-science nominee, the Afghan novelist Khaled Hosseini -- along with several dozen others among the world's current, media-recognized, "leaders and revolutionaries, heroes and pioneers, scientists and thinkers, artists and entertainers, builders and titans," to say nothing of their chefs. (I noticed that nobody nominated Bernie Madoff.) I also consulted the "100 most beautiful people" of People magazine. After eliminating overlap from the list above, I further discounted "Kate," "Salma," "Carrie," the entire cast of Gossip Girl, Jessica Alba, their respective boyfriends where applicable, and anyone with the first name "Vanessa." I might have hesitated to eliminate Penelope Cruz, but she seems no longer to be "top hundred," and anyway my criteria were a little arbitrary in that case ("beautiful Spanish women with long hair who remind me of a girl I once saw in Barcelona back in the days of Franco"). As noted above, global warming alarmists are going out of fashion, owing to the collapse of their tenuous evidence, and the global cooling alarmists have yet to organize their fans. This eliminates all the leading climatologists except Reid Bryson. The pioneer of modern climatology, Prof. Bryson has been blowing holes in man-made climate-change alarms for decades. He is the man who replied to the "retreat of the Alpine glaciers" hysteria by asking, "And what did you find when the snow melted?" (A silver mine, with all the tools stacked up for the next spring: i.e. the glacier was recent.) He should have been man of the year around 1999. Among other leading "scientists and thinkers," it is the same story, endlessly repeated. The people who make the lists turn out, nearly invariably, to be wrong about nearly everything; the people who have been fairly consistently right never make the lists. It was typical of the year in which the Large Hadron Collider debuted as the most expensive dysfunctional white elephant in history, that the Nobel physics prize went to three particle physicists. Meanwhile, after reviewing a list of the "top women scientists of 2008," I was unable to find a name I recognized. I may be accused of overlooking my fellow Canadians; I frequently am. We have no shortage of admirable people up here, but among those known to me, none are famous, except perhaps Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. I have a pocket list of plausible award-winners in the infamy department, from Rideau Hall down, but we are still within the Twelve Days of Christmas. (Suffice to say today was traditionally the Feast of the Holy Innocents.) That is probably enough drumroll. We must get to business. Pass myself the envelope, please. My selection for "Man of the Year 2008" is: Sarah Palin. The citation reads: "For a politician of real accomplishment and promise, who has somehow managed, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to cut through the verbiage and posturing of an election campaign, and look an electorate in the eye; a politician whose policy instincts are sound, whose wits are sharp, and whose moral vision is unclouded -- who drives all the right people crazy, across party lines." My friend John O'Sullivan, who worked with Mrs. Thatcher, and followed her career from long before she became Britain's prime minister, made the argument for Ms. Palin's resemblance to that earlier heroine in an excellent piece in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. That Ms. Palin lacks the requisite parliamentary and debating experience, he allows; just as Mrs. Thatcher lacked the requisite executive experience, in setting out for high office. Moreover, Mr. O'Sullivan leaves room for imponderables, for we know the extent of Mrs. Thatcher's courage and stamina only in retrospect. But thanks to the loss of her ticket in what may well prove the recent U.S. election most worth losing, Ms. Palin now has time to hone her skills, to study and supply her deficiencies, and focus on the road ahead. She has a remarkable natural gift, her "star quality": the ability not only to instill hope and confidence in an electorate, but hope and confidence in the right things. She is the best thing that happened in politics all year. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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